Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

With childbirth being the top reason for hospitalization in Canada, it is important that the care provided in maternal-newborn hospital settings is safe and aligned with best practice recommendations. Across Ontario, there is wide variability in maternal-newborn care practices and outcomes for mothers and infants; this shows that room for improvement exists. All Ontario maternal-newborn hospitals have access to a novel online audit and feedback system, a "dashboard", which shows how they are performing on selected key performance indicators. This dashboard is an important first step to show maternal-newborn units where there is need for practice improvements in their setting. However, previous work with Ontario maternal-newborn units has shown that seeing an evidence-practice gap on the dashboard is not enough for all teams to commit to making a change, nor does it provide any guidance on how to actually implement or sustain improvements. Using an established implementation science framework, my study will develop and field-test an implementation guide to help maternal-newborn hospital teams to develop an action plan to most effectively create practice change on key performance indicators. I will first create a working group with experts in implementation science and stakeholders from maternal-newborn care. Together, we will work to create an implementation guide based on information from the literature and previously collected data on user experiences with the dashboard. The implementation guide will then be reviewed by maternal-newborn stakeholders. I will then follow 3-5 maternal-newborn units for six months as they use the implementation guide in real-time to plan for practice improvements on one or more key performance indicators. The findings of this study will contribute to developing a resource that can facilitate implementation of priority practice changes in maternal-newborn units, which can ultimately improve the care and outcomes for mothers and infants.